Take an Inspiration Day | Steve Pavlina

Have you ever felt the urge to explore a totally different field, skill, or interest for a while?

What is it you’d like to try, if you only had the time? Music? Programming? Web design? Entrepreneurship? Camping? A new exercise? A better way of eating? A new social group?

But then of course, you talk yourself out of it, don’t you? You probably tell yourself things like:

I can’t be starting something new right now.
I have too many other things to deal with.
It would take a big commitment to get anywhere with this, and I don’t have that kind of time.
I’m not ready to transition yet.

No one is forcing you to commit though. Commitment is unnecessary at this point. Why not simply taste and sample your new interest? Give it a day to impress you.

Set aside one day to explore your new interest. Say yes to it for one day only. During that day let it guide you, lead you, and make its case for further exploration.

Fire up GarageBand, and try writing your very first song. It’ll probably suck, but so what? It will be your own creation.

Film some video with your phone, fire up iMovie, and make your first movie. You’ll learn a great deal by doing it.

Go to an art supply store, tell an employee you want to try painting, and ask for help to buy the bare minimum supplies you need to paint for one day. Take it home, and paint the day away. See what flows through you. Maybe you’re more creative than you realize.

Spend a day researching and reading about a whole new field — the one that keeps coming up for you recently.

Go out and visit stores you wouldn’t ordinarily visit. Talk to the salespeople. Ask all the questions you can think of. Become as much of an expert as you can in one day.

Go vegan for a day, and you’ll save more water than you would by not showering for a year. There are thousands of free recipes online, so use Google to find them. Make a shopping list, cook up a storm, and have a feast.

Read about the equipment in a part of the gym you never visit. Learn some exercises you can do. Then do a full workout there. It will give you a nice sense of accomplishment.

Have you ever played tennis? Disc golf? The equipment is cheap. Go have your first game.

After that one immersive day, you’ll be a slightly different person. You’ll have a fresher understanding of your interest. And you’ll be in a better position to assess and evaluate whether you’d like to explore it further.

Maybe one day is all you need. You satisfied your curiosity and discovered that the door wasn’t for you. That’s a good outcome since you won’t have to worry about those distracting urges for years to come.

Maybe that day triggers many more questions. You got a taste, but it wasn’t enough. You want more. So take more inspiration days, half days, quarter days, or whatever you need to continue your exploration. Lean into it more.

Maybe that day was amazing — full of rapid learning and encouraging progress. You walked through a door and discovered a delightful new path. Wonderful! Keep going. Let the inspiration continue to motivate you.

What if nothing inspires you? Then you’re not listening very well. If you can’t hear the voice of inspiration, turn down the volume of everything else. Turn off the distractions like the constantly buzzing phone, sit quietly by yourself, and take an hour to simply listen. Reflect on your life, your lifestyle, your work or school, your relationships, your finances, and your body. Listen to your thoughts. Hear yourself think. Notice your feelings.

What’s nudging you to change, grow, or shift? Where do you notice a pushing or pulling sensation? Where’s the dissatisfaction? Where’s the disappointment? Where’s the gentle request to try something new and different?

Maybe you have many commitments already. Maybe you’re busy. Maybe you have some great excuses. Give your inspirations an outlet anyway — a small slice of your time. Otherwise they’ll poke you… then nag you… then eventually overload you with regret.
Give an inspiration a day to make its case. Open the box and peer inside. Listen, taste, and explore.

Source 

Triple Your Personal Productivity | Steve Pavlina

Have you ever had the experience of looking back on your week with the sinking feeling that you didn’t get as much done as you’d hoped? When building a successful career or a business of your own, your time is perhaps your most valuable asset, and your income is a direct result of how you spend your time. You cannot buy any more time than you’re given, and the clock is always ticking. A few years ago, I discovered a simple system that allowed me to nearly triple my productivity, and in this article I’ll share some very practical ideas you can apply right away to increase your effectiveness without working any harder than you do now.

Keep a Detailed Time Log

The first step to better managing your time is to find out how you’re currently spending your time. Keeping a time log is a very effective way to do this, and after trying it for just one day, you’ll immediately gain tremendous insight into where your time is actually going. The very act of measuring is often enough to raise your unconscious habits into your consciousness, where you then have a chance to scrutinize and change them.

Here’s how to keep a time log. Throughout your day record the time whenever you start or stop any activity. Consider using a stopwatch to just record time intervals for each activity. 
You can do this during only your working time or throughout your entire day. At the end of the day, sort all the time chunks into general categories, and find out what percentage of your time is being spent on each type of activity. If you want to be thorough, do this for a week, and calculate the percentage of your total time that you spent on each type of activity. Be as detailed as possible. Note how much time you spend on email, reading newsgroups, web surfing, phone calls, eating, going to the bathroom, etc. If you get up out of your chair, it probably means you need to make an entry in your time log. I typically end up with 50-100 log entries per day.

You may be surprised to discover you’re spending only a small fraction of your working time doing what you’d consider to be actual work. Studies have shown that the average office worker does only 1.5 hours of actual work per day. The rest of the time is spent socializing, taking coffee breaks, eating, engaging in non-business communication, shuffling papers, and doing lots of other non-work tasks. The average full-time office worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00am and begins to wind down around 3:30pm.

Analyze Your Results

The first time I kept a time log, I only finished 15 hours worth of real work in a week where I spent about 60 hours in my office. Even though I was technically about twice as productive as the average office worker, I was still disturbed by the results. Where did those other 45 hours go? My time log laid it all out for me, showing me all the time drains I wasn’t consciously aware of — checking email too often, excessive perfectionism doing tasks that didn’t need to be done, over-reading the news, taking too much time for meals, succumbing to preventable interruptions, etc.

Calculate Your Personal Efficiency Ratio

When I realized that I spent 60 hours at the office but only completed 15 hours of actual work within that time, I started asking myself some interesting questions. My income and my sense of accomplishment depended only on those 15 hours, not on the total amount of time I spent at the office. So I decided to begin recording my daily efficiency ratio as the amount of time I spent on actual work divided by the total amount of time I spent in my office. While it certainly bothered me that I was only working 25% of the time initially, I also realized it would be extremely foolish to simply work longer hours.

Here’s the formula:

Efficiency ratio = time doing real work / time spent at work

Reduce Your Work Hours to Force an Increase in Efficiency

If you’ve ever tried to discipline yourself to do something you weren’t really motivated to do, you most likely failed. That was naturally the result I experienced when I tried to discipline myself to work harder. In fact, trying harder actually de-motivated me and drove my efficiency ratio even lower. So I reluctantly decided to try the opposite approach. The next day I would only allow myself to put in five hours total at the office, and the rest of the day I wouldn’t allow myself to work at all. Well, an interesting thing happened, as I’m sure you can imagine. My brain must have gotten the idea that working time was a scarce commodity because I worked almost the entire five hours straight and got an efficiency ratio of over 90%. I continued this experiment for the rest of the week and ended up getting about 25 hours of work done with only 30 hours total spent in my office, for an efficiency ratio of over 80%. So I was able to reduce my weekly working time by 30 hours while also getting 10 more hours of real work done. If your time log shows your efficiency ratio to be on the low side, try severely limiting your total amount of working time for a day, and see what happens. Once your brain realizes that working time is scarce, you suddenly become a lot more efficient because you have to be. When you have tight time constraints, you will usually find a way to get your work done. But when you have all the time in the world, it’s too easy to be inefficient.

Gradually Increase Work Hours While Maintaining Peak Efficiency

Over a period of a few weeks, I was able to keep my efficiency ratio above 80% while gradually increasing my total weekly office time. I’ve been able to maintain this for many years now, and I commonly get about 40 hours of real work done every week, while only spending about 45 total hours in my office. I’ve learned that this is ideal for me. If I try to put in more time at the office, then my productivity drops off rapidly. The interesting thing is that the system that allowed me to optimize my effectiveness at work also created a tremendous amount of balance in all other areas of my life. Even though I was able to use this approach to triple my business productivity, I still gained plenty of time to pursue personal interests.

Time logging is the intelligent choice to ensure optimal productivity without increasing your hours. But time logging need only be done periodically to provide these benefits. I do it for one week every 3-6 months, and over the years it has made a huge difference for me, always providing me with new distinctions. If I go too many months without time logging, my productivity gradually drops as I fall back into unconscious time-wasting habits. You’ll probably find as I do that your gut feelings about your productivity are closely related to how much real work you actually get done. When you feel your productivity is lower than you’d like, raise your awareness via time logging, measure your efficiency ratio, and then optimize your efficiency to boost your productivity back up where it belongs. Time logging is a high leverage activity that takes very little time and effort to implement, but the long-term payoff is tremendous.

Please let me know what you think below.

Source 

Six-Step Process to Conducting a Year-End Review of Your Career | Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.

The end of the year is often a time of many events — wrapping up business for the year while also wrapping holiday presents. This article presents something you can give to yourself — something that you can get done during the holiday lull or over some vacation days — a quick and easy process for examining what you’ve accomplished in your career this year and where you want to go with it next year.

Of course, you may have already done at least some preliminary work on reviewing the year — especially if your employer hands out year-end bonuses or conducts year-end performance reviews — and if so, that’s a good place to start your year-end review.

But unlike your on-the-job performance review, the purpose of this article is to suggest you consider conducting an even more important assessment — taking stock of your career. Now is the perfect time to review where you are, where you’ve been, and where you want to go.

Before you begin your assessment, take a moment to ask yourself the most important question: Am I happy and fulfilled by my job and career? No matter how successful you’ve been in the past 11 months, if you are fundamentally unhappy with your work, spend the vast majority of your year-end review focusing on self-assessment and discovering your career passion. Consider a side-trip from this article to the Quintessential Careers Finding Your Career Passion Tutorial.

Don’t rush your review. Consider using a weekend or one or more of your vacation days to reflect on your career. You don’t need to — and probably shouldn’t — complete all six steps in one sitting. Break it up over several days if you like.

Step One: Review Career Goals.

Did you set any goals for your career this year — formally or informally? Most people have some idea of what they want to accomplish next in their careers, such as getting a promotion and/or raise or perhaps achieving better work/life balance. Setting some goals is an important activity because goals help provide the focus you need to move your career forward — and to avoid distractions or activities that may slow your career progress (or worse, devalue you). So, if you had any goals for this year, answer these questions:

• Did I achieve my career goals?
• Am I satisfied with what I did relative to my goals?
• Did anything happen to change my goals over the course of the year?
• How should I modify my goals for next year?

Step Two: Review Your Career Year.

What have you done this year? This step is about documenting your career progression ad identifying key achievements. Thinking about all you’ve done over the past 11 months or so, ask yourself these questions:

• What have I accomplished?
• What new skills have I acquired?
• What have I learned?
• What opportunities were gained and lost?
• How am I better today than I was at the beginning of the year?

Step Three: Develop Your Career Synopsis.

Where are you in your career? Review all aspects of your career and examine where you stand at this juncture. Some questions to ask yourself:

• Am I where I should be in my career?
• What has helped or hindered my progression?
• Am I happy with my current employer?
• What are my strengths and weakness?

Step Four: Envision Your Future.

What’s your next career step? Take some time to plan for next year (and perhaps beyond), picturing the path you want your career to take. Again, here are some questions to help you:

• What do I want to be doing more of in my career?
• What do I want to be doing less of in my career?
• What’s the next step in my career?
• When should I be taking this next step?
• What’s my ideal/ultimate career dream?

Step Five: Career Action Steps for Your Future.

How will you get to that future career? Make a list of what you need to do — career goals for the coming year — to get to where you want to be next in your career. These might be things such as building your network, gaining additional experiences, changing employers, strengthening your career brand, or pursuing additional training/education/certifications. Questions to ask yourself:

• What do I need to prepare myself for this next step?
• Do I need to find a new employer to make the next step?
• How do I position myself for this next step?

Step Six: Share Your Career Vision.

Are your career goals and action plans feasible? Schedule a meeting with your mentor(s) and to get reactions to your plan, as well as advice for achieving it.

Final Thoughts on Career Year-End Reviews

Once you’ve completed these six steps, you should not only know yourself and your career better, but have some specific goals and action steps to help you progress along a career plan.

Another benefit from completing this year-end review is that the results from part of the analysis should assist you in updating your resume if you have not been keeping it current as the year progressed. Even if you are extremely happy with your employer, it makes sense to have a current resume for that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or worse, if your employer decides its time to downsize the workforce.

Finally, use these free Quintessential Careers resources to assist you with your career year-end review and plan for your future:

• Using a SWOT Analysis in Your Career Planning
• The Art of Career and Job-Search Networking
• Career Branding Tutorial
• Career Planning Articles
• Your Career Planning and Job-Search Calendar
• Plotting Story of Your Ideal Career
• Moving Up the Ladder: 10 Strategies for Getting Yourself Promoted
• Value of a Mentor: Find Yourself a Mentor
• Workplace Resources for Dealing With Your Current Job/Employer

Questions about some of the terminology used in this article? Get more information (definitions and links) on key college, career, and job-search terms by going to our Job-Seeker’s Glossary of Job-Hunting Terms.

Let me know what you think below.

Source 

5 Daily Habits That Will Increase Your Productivity Levels | Matt Mayberry

“How can I become more productive?” is a question that will continue to always come up.

Everyone wants to get more done and feel a sense of accomplishment as each day comes to an end. There are a million different productivity tips out there, but here a five ways to increase your productivity levels that have worked wonders in my own life.

1. Arrive early, stay later

Living in a congested city such as Chicago, I have found that if I start my workday before everyone else, I can save time by beating traffic and getting to my most important tasks right away. Sitting in traffic will do nothing but frustrate you and set a negative tone for the rest of your day. The same goes for when the end of the work day rolls around.

Related: Want to Be Successful? Quit Slacking Off.

Your ability to save these extra hours can not only increase your productivity levels drastically, but help you become one of the highest paid and most productive people in your field. Arriving early and staying a little bit later could make all the difference in the world.

2. Plan each day the night before

This is a total game changer. If you spend just 15 minutes before you go to bed the night before creating your to-do list and prioritizing it, you will have a head start on your day when the morning rolls around. After I create my to-do list, I pick the most important tasks and put a little star next to them reminding me that these are the tasks that need to be done to push me forward with achieving big goals.

                              

3. Leave the office for lunch

This is something so small that can have such a powerful effect on how you work for the remainder of your day. Getting out of your work environment for lunch can ease stress levels, refresh your creativity and help you to re-focus for when it’s time to go back to work. I often take a short walk to clear my head and think about how I want the rest of my day to go.

4. Minimize distractions

This seems self-explanatory, but in this day and age, distractions are everywhere. If you work from a computer, as most do, there is the temptation to check social media and surf the Internet, among many other things. When it’s time to work, work! If possible, close your door and have a "do not disturb" sign hanging on the door so your co-workers know not to bother you.

Related: One Way to Beat Bad Online Habits and Be More Productive

Every company has those employees that love to talk about what was on TV the night before instead of actually getting important things done. Don’t let these average achievers hold you back. Set boundaries and try your very best to abide by them daily. Your ability to minimize distractions as much as possible can single handedly increase productivity.

5. Keep your goals in sight at all times

After setting extremely big and exciting goals that you want to accomplish, keep them in sight at all times. I keep a list of my goals in my phone, a note card that I carry in my pocket and in a spiral notebook. The main objective is to keep your goals in a place where you will end up seeing them many times throughout your day. When I glance down at my goals, my motivation levels to get things done goes through the roof.

Start to picture yourself as the most productive person in your field. How does it feel? What tasks are you spending the majority of your time on? What is your philosophy on personal performance? Be in competition with yourself to see how much you can get done. Have fun with it. Make it a game.

Always try to beat the person you were the day before. Keep track of your results and work every single day to be a highly productive individual and watch the small daily victories begin to transform your life.

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241797


Why don't you give it a go and report back below?